Actualidad

The struggle of a group of mothers has revived the debate on drug legalization in Peru. The mothers, organized in the association “Buscando Esperanza” (“Searching for Hope”), have brought about institutional measures in favour of medical cannabis. The association is formed by mothers of children ailed with chronic neurological illnesses and aims for regulation of marijuana with medical purposes as well as promoting homegrowing.

The other day, I posted on my Instagram account a picture of my daughter in a bikini, standing on a swing in the garden. A few hours later, the image was deleted from my profile. It seems that the folks at Instagram considered the content of the image, which simply showed the innocence of a child happily playing on a swing on a sunny summer afternoon, to be offensive or inappropriate. Recently, a friend of mine who works for the Spanish Cannabis seed bank, Buddha Seeds, was telling me how Facebook had censored a contest he had organized on social media because apparently it went against their policies or “community standards.”

For someone like me, who consumes industrial quantities of codeine (and by that I mean more than several grams a day), it's something that really shocks me. Why the hell is codeine suddenly appearing in rap songs by groups from all over the world in every language you can think of? To find out, I asked BertiMC -- a rapper from Salamanca -- what he thought and his answer was simply, "It's the fashion." And he's right. A fatal fashion started by a guy named Dj Screw, who died of an overdose of codeine mixed with other drugs, which seems to have started a trend, a kind of cult, if you will, within this musical genre.

A recent study is trying to push the UK to follow in some USA States’ steps and allow the retail selling of cannabis to adults in authorized establishments. This would generate the annual amount of a billion pounds in taxes. But not only that, it would also reduce significantly the damage to both users and general society, according to the same study, the most detailed report to date on drug liberalization in the UK.

Tim Tyler was convicted to life imprisonment in 1994 for selling LSD to a police informant. Now, after more than 20 years in a federal prison for a non violent crime related to drug trafficking, the President of the United States has decided to grant him clemency.